You know it used to be Taiwan (Republic of China, properly) who was a permanent member of the Security Council, right?

There’s also this version.

Most dads will have seen it, though, right?

Chivalry & Sorcery has had, for its entire history, great tools for planning and laying out a medieval nation. The latest edition’s version of this (a sample of which is attached) covers it with a very simple set of tables and definitions.

In addition it has very good information on feudal European history, society, laws, customs, etc. that can be used to inform a GM’s campaign setting to give it a sense of verisimilitude. And finally on top of all of this is the influence system (which has been an important piece of C&S since its first edition in 1977) makes it easier to determine NPC relationships and reactions with less of the silly degrees of randomness other games have in their “reaction roll” systems (when they have any guidance of any kind at all, I mean).

Jovian Chronicles has a good base system that you can divorce from the setting pretty easily. (The same system is used in a planet-bound SF game—Heavy Gear—and an apocalyptic fantasy game—Tribe 8.) It has a pretty simple system for making vehicles which scratches your “statted ships with ship to ship combat” itch.

Catan really did remind me of Monopoly in this regard. Once you pull ahead you stay ahead and move further ahead faster and faster. And if you’re trailing, you trail further and further. With all the tedium that involves since you can’t leave.

Weirdly I find Catan suffers exactly from this, and you have the added problem of if you fall behind you’re just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing. Hour after hour, doing nothing. But you can’t leave the game because that would throw everybody else off.

I won’t play Catan any longer.

Star Fleet Battles. On paper it was a gateway game for me to get into wargames (a genre of game I’d always found tedious and lacking any fun of any sort) because it was a subject matter I was interested in. My SO introduced me to it because I liked old school Star Trek and he was a fanatic player of the game.

Four hours later and we were on, like, turn three. The game systems were inconsistent and incoherent. Planning out your moves made the game into a career bureaucrat’s wet dream of paperwork. And when, finally, the two ships actually REACHED each other, there was about two minutes of dice rolling and … while the game wasn’t formally over, it was clear that there was no point in continuing; the victor was a foregone conclusion.

But we still played another two hours before the game ended.

So not only did I hate the game, I also had my hatred of wargames in general hardened.

I’ve only seen diviners as a type handled properly in one game which, if my faulty memory is correct, was C&S (2nd edition, probably also 1st, but not 3rd onward), but I may be huffing paint thinner.

First, diviners had a group of useful spells like detecting traps, hidden things, etc. This meant you didn’t get that whole weirdo vision quest thing with “information” that was only recognizable as such long after the fact, rendering the divination kind of useless, as the only thing a diviner could do.

But even for the visions there was a decent system in place. The diviner would cast the spell and based on the results of that roll, paired with a roll (or decision) made in secret by the GM, get a degree of success that translated into percentile points. The GM’s roll/decision decided between good or bad omens.

If the GM rolled/decided on good omens, they’d come up with one of those vague, flavourful visions so beloved byirritating to players. But… at any point for the duration of the cast augury, if something that could kinda/sorta be interpreted to belong to that vision showed up in play (GMs being encouraged to err on the side of the player), the player could use some of that percentile pool to modify die rolls in their favour (or, equivalently against the opposition’s favour) to do things like turn failures into successes, or successes into critical successes or the like, thus retroactively making the vision “come true” mechanically.

If the rolled/decided omens were bad omens, the percentile pool (smaller if the player rolled well, larger if the player rolled poorly) was instead given to the GM to use to stymie and confound the players in ways related to the vision.

The end result was that the flavourful vision was there, but its application to the situation was determined in play and had mechanical relevance, which was satisfying to the players.

Replace “Lemmyverse” with “the American left” and you’re closer to the truth.

• The American left is against racism … yet harbours an alarming amount of antisemitism and an increasing amount of sinophobia.
• The American left is against ageism … directed at young people. Old people are open season.
• The American left is against religious bigotry … except Christians. . . .

It’s just tribalism cosplaying as idealism. (And it’s why, for example, Chinese LGBT groups have been quietly removing themselves from interaction with American LGBTQA+ groups over the past few years.)

Let’s see:

• signed up a day ago ✅
• makes a group that’s guaranteed to be contentious ✅
• responds to people’s contention in ways intended to egg them on ✅
• has literally no other content in profile ✅

Conclusion: Troll. Just block and move on.

American plain old bread is way too damned sweet!

Or, you know, someone knows German, since “Stollen” is a German fruit bread that anybody who’s ever been to Germany in the winter will likely have seen and probably tasted as well.

Those so simple-minded they think there’s only two kinds of people, and…

It’s harder for female characters because it always wants to add giant gazongas, but eventually you can get it to generate a normal looking character.

I would put phrases like “small-breasted woman” or at one point, in frustration, “small-breasted, and by this I mean SMALL, not LARGER THAN HER FRICKIN’ HEAD YOU HALLUCINATING DIGITAL PARROT!” into the prompts.

I always got breasts that were a sizable fraction of the head size. Often larger than the head size. Except for that last frustrated prompt. That one got me huge breasts with parrots sitting on them.

This is what happens when you think your “AI” is “neutral”. It isn’t. It’s filled with all the biases of society, only with a patina of neutrality slathered on top.